I'm feeling like I'm at a little bit of an uncute stage in my pregnancy, where I definitely do have a discernible tummy, but it's not quite "oh hey, there's absolutely, positively, unequivocally a baby in there," the way I think I thought it would be at this point. Instead, I just seem to have grown a bit everywhere, which makes me look less like I swallowed a basketball and more like I am the basketball, particularly since I'm still mostly squeezing into my regular clothes.

(Look, if you just want to know immediately, you can scroll down a little bit and find out. If, however, you like torturing yourself with the delicious anticipation—and also know me well enough to realize that it takes me forever to get to the punchline of any story—you may want to read a hundred rambling paragraphs of lead-in first.)

I have been sleeping terribly. Sometimes I catch myself thinking "oh well, only 21 more weeks of this to go!" and then the part of me that wasn't thinking that reaches out and slaps the part of me that was, because what? Do I think sleeping is going to get easier once the baby is born?

Before I got pregnant—before I even started trying to get pregnant—Sean and I would refer to our mythical future child as "Hamish." I can't remember exactly how this started, although I do remember telling Sean that I used to babysit a sweet little boy named Hamish, and Sean declaring it his favorite baby name ever, but we somehow fell into the habit of using "Hamish" as a synonym for "baby." Before too long, we'd have perfectly normal conversations with each other that contained sentences like "When we have a Hamish, we can..." a

Okay, we're about to look at ten pictures of my midsection, and I need to make sure that you're alright with that. You said you didn't mind if we talked about pregnancy-related stuff for a little while, so I thought I'd take you up on it and share with you my ever-expanding girth, which I have been photographing since week 9 like every other elated first-time mother-to-be with a camera and an internet connection.

So me, Kate Middleton, and Kim Kardashian, huh? Can't say I ever thought I'd be part of that trio. It's so absurd, it almost sounds like the beginning of a joke: Holly, Kate Middleton, and Kim Kardashian walk into a bar. Except the next line would have to be "....and each order a non-alcoholic beer," which probably wouldn't make for a very lively joke at all. Or a very lively evening.

This is what I am wearing the day we drive from Connecticut to Maine: a pink and camel-colored sweater, soft and narrowly striped. Outside, it is sunny and bright and memorably cold. It is the morning after Thanksgiving.

The other day I went to the Safeway near my house to get some last minute ingredients for the chocolate mousse I wanted to make Sean for Valentine's Day. I have known Sean for almost seventeen years, and I only recently found out that one of his favorite desserts is chocolate mousse, which struck me as funny for some reason, because it just seems so....so....I don't know, so eighties. Oh hey, want a slap wrap with that chocolate mousse? Should we eat it while we watch Alf? I'll wear my jelly shoes if you wear your hypercolor t-shirt!

I saw the movie Flight on Sunday night, and I don't believe I have slept the same way since. I mean, I knew from the title—and I don't think I'm giving anything away here—that there was going to be a fairly tense plane crashy bit, but I wasn't really banking on it being that tense, so tense that I actually had to manually unclench my fists afterwards and massage my palms to remove the indentations left there by my fingernails.

I'm turning 33 tomorrow—although since you are most likely reading this on Friday the 8th, I'm actually turning 33 today, right as we speak—and I have planned the waking hours of my birthday as though they were a military operation. They would be a pretty cushy military operation, I have to say—doubtful that Operation Valiant Eagle would include any spa time, for example—but I do nevertheless have a pretty meticulous plan in place for my first day as a 33-year-old, and it begins with not going to work.